The following series, all found elsewhere within this fonds, include records which document the state functions of the Executive Council during the period 1791-1841 and which complement the minutes found in the present series: Rough and Draft Minutes of the Executive Council series; Submissions to the Executive Council relating to the Audit of Provincial Public Accounts series; Judicial Records of the Executive Council series; and Records of the Executive Council relating to Highways, Roads and Bridges series.
Contemporary copies of Council minutes may be found as enclosures to despatches from the Governor to the Colonial Office. These are found in the series CO 42, Canada, formerly British North America, Original Correspondence (MG11-CO42), in the Colonial Office fonds or in the Duplicate Despatches fonds (MG40-A2). The submissions appear to have been included in that copying only for particular questions, such as appeals for clemency or complex boundary disputes.
Duplicate copies of minutes of the Executive Council are also included among the records found in the Minutes series of the Executive Council fonds (MG8-A17). Those records were among the duplicates which the Public Record Office transferred to Library and Archives Canada following the PRO reorganization of 1908-1910.
There may be a duplicate transcription of the analytical index found in vols. 43 and 45 of this series in the Herman Witsius Ryland and family fonds (R1427, formerly MG24-B3).
The records of submissions on state business to the Executive Council of Lower Canada are intimately linked in terms of business process with the decisions of the Executive Council as reflected in the minutes found in the present series. However, the state submission records (other than those related to the audit function, which are found elsewhere within this fonds in the Submissions to the Executive Council relating to the Audit of Provincial Public Accounts series) are not found within this fonds. Although they are records which, by virtue of their provenance and date, would normally be included in this fonds, they are found in other fonds in the holdings of Library and Archives Canada. For practical reasons relating to the arrangement of such records by the custodians who inherited them after 1791, they cannot now be included within the present fonds. A number of records currently described in RG 4 (Records of the Civil and Provincial Secretaries, Quebec, Lower Canada and Canada East), series A1, vols. 53-622, date from the Province of Lower Canada period and are documents which the Executive Council would have created and/or accumulated. As explained in the 1953 published inventory (Public Archives of Canada - Manuscript Division - Preliminary Inventory - Record Group 1, Executive Council, Canada, 1764-1867 ), the Executive Council records included in those volumes were already inter-mingled at the time of acquisition by the Archives with records of the Civil and Provincial Secretaries for Lower Canada. This inter-mingling is attributed in the 1953 inventory to the fact that for many years the offices of Clerk of Council and Civil Secretary were held in plurality by one individual who, apparently, did not keep the records separate, although there is reason to believe that the inter-mingling is attributable to interference with the records by a later custodian (the Keeper of the Records after 1867 in the Office of the Secretary of State of Canada). Regardless of the explanation, it was recognized in 1953, and is no less true today, that it is not feasible to separate out the records belonging to each office and to attach them to their respective fonds. Therefore, these records have been left described as part of RG 4 and users should consult that fonds.
Researchers should also note that a small quantity of records of ordinances which date from 1792 are now found in the Ordinances and Related Legislative Records of the Council (1764-1775) and the Legislative Council (1775-1791) series, within the Records of the Councils of the Province of Quebec fonds. These records document actions taken during the transitional period immediately after the creation of the Province of Lower Canada but before the institutions of governance had been fully established. For that reason, and because of the physical impracticability of splitting the records, they have been attached to the Province of Quebec fonds rather than to the present fonds.